If you have never heard of this story before, you’re in for it. Being from Halifax, Nova Scotia I had recently learned about this case last year and I could hardly believe I had never heard about it prior.
In the late 1920′s a man by the name William Young and his wife Lila Young opened what was known as the Life and Health Sanitarium in East Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada. William Young was born in Memramcook, New Brunswick in 1898 and was aspiring to be an Adventist medical missionary without medical training. He graduated from the Medical Evangelists College in 1923.
Lila Coolen was born in Fox Point, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1899. She became a teacher and taught in Fox Point. In 1925, at the age of 26, she met William Peach Young, and they married that year.
William became a licensed chiropractor in Chicago in December 1927 and two months later in February 1928 him and Lila moved back to Nova Scotia to open their business. Lila was a midwife and their business was soon re-named the Ideal Maternity Home & Sanitarium with William as the superintendent and Lila as the managing director.
The Ideal Maternity home was for women, mostly having babies out of wedlock and needed a safe place to have their baby and to escape gossip at the time due to the times of this being extremely taboo to have a child out of wedlock. The maternity home was also for married women seeking maternity care
For a married woman she had to pay an average of $75 each for delivery and two weeks of care following the birth. For an unwed mother, the price was higher, averaging $100 or $200 for a room, to deliver the baby and to arrange an adoption for the baby. There was extra costs as well for diapers and supplies, as well as a $2 weekly fee for maintenance. These were quite high prices in the late 1920′s and early 1930′s considering the weekly wage was around $8 at the time.
If a baby died in the maternity home the Youngs would charge the mother $20 for funeral expenses and then they would put the baby in a white pine butter box, which acted as the “coffin.”
The worst part was that both William and Lila Young promoted themselves as doctors with medical training, though neither had any. These women thought they were going to a reputable maternity home where they would get high quality care for both themselves and their babies. Because a lot of these women could not afford the high price of services they were allowed to “pay off their debts” to the Youngs by performing domestic duties around the maternity home.
Lila would deliver their babies herself, but some of the mothers mentioned that she was very rough and almost scary in demeanour, no one wanted to cross Lila. Between 1928 and 1935 there was 148 births at the maternity home, and 12 infant deaths. This meant the mortality rate was 8.1% at the home, an extremely high rate.
In March 1936 both Lila and William were charged with two counts of manslaughter because one of the mothers in their care, Eva Nieforth and her newborn child both died in January 1936 due to negligence and unsanitary conditions in the home. Both the Young’s were acquitted of this charge after a three day trial in May 1936, however the police promised to investigate any death of an infant at the maternity home from then on.
The Young’s handyman Glen Shatford admitted that he buried anywhere between 100 and 125 babies in a field by Fox Point, where Lila was from. Adoption was the greatest way the Young’s were making money, charging around $1000 per infant in the 1930′s and around $5000 per infant during World War II. If the babies were not adopted due to either being mixed race or had physical defects they were starved to death.
It is claimed that Lila and William Young made at least $3.5 million from adoption between 1937 and 1947, an astronomical amount for the time. Some of the adoptions the birth mothers did not know about until they were already complete. The mothers also had to sign a contract allowing William to be in total control over what happened to their baby within 14 days after the birth or else they’d be charged another $30.
The Young’s sold a lot of the babies to American couples and then would tell the birth mother’s their babies had died.
Business was booming, which caused Lila to brag. By 1943 the Young’s were housing about 70 infants on any given day, and even though officials had been watching the Young’s for around a decade, since their charges of manslaughter in 1936, they did not find evidence of the horrid conditions of the maternity home until 1945. Apparently the maternity home was swarming with flies, had filthy bedding and infants were weighing 50% of the normal weight for their age.
When the Maternity Boarding House Act of 1940 was introduced it demanded that maternity homes needed licensing from incorporated companies. The Young’s license was rejected and they were ordered to shut down their maternity home in November 1945.
The Young’s however continued to run their maternity home and they were charged on multiple accounts for violating the Maternity Boarding House Act and practicing medicine without a license. They only ended up paying $150 in fines.
Lila became to become extremely anger at the negative media attention she and the maternity home were getting and she filed a $25,000 libel suit against a local newspaper. Of course this came with a lot of damning testimony and continued on with a trial that completely exposed William and Lila’s maternity home for the scam it was. The maternity home was finally closed for good and the Young’s went bankrupt, ending up selling their property in Nova Scotia and moved to Quebec.
It is said that during the time of Young’s maternity home 400 to 600 victims, mostly infants and some of the mother’s died at the hands of William and Lila Young.
The maternity home was supposed to turn into a hotel resort but ended up burning to the ground on September 23, 1962. William Young died from cancer right before Christmas in 1962 and Lila died from leukaemia in 1967.
